elmatus

I can't imagine Fletch surviving the year as GM. He may linger in the org in some other capacity, because the Flyers are seemingly averse to truly cutting ties with people despite failures, but he won't be GM anymore after this year. Ideally, he shouldn't be anywhere near the decision making table, but something tells me we're not done with him completely for a while yet. As far as Torts goes, I'm sure he'll do his best to push the team to play harder. Like others here, I don't think that's going to amount to any huge improvement overall though. That's not Torts' fault necessarily, he just doesn't have the pieces needed to really win many games. If anything, we just lost the only guy who could consistently put up points every year. There's every reason to believe this team will be easier to beat now than they already were just on that basis alone. Torts may shore up the team defense by instituting better defensive play. I could see that. I could see this team overall just being harder to score against. Unfortunately, that type of attrition play is poorly suited to today's firebrand NHL. We don't have players who can outplay the opposition offensively, which makes it largely impossible to win games nowadays. Gone are the days of teams winning on the backs of 1-0 or 2-1 games. The best teams around are scoring 4+ goals a game. We're nowhere near that, and Torts isn't going to make us into that. Is Torts a scapegoat? I dunno. I doubt it. I think he's just a coach who happened to be available and who has a reputation for being hardnosed and whatever else. I think a lot of his hiring is on the basis of the narrative he brings. It's a selling point for the brass to say "we hear you! we're bringing in the enforcer who will whip these guys into shape". I just don't agree with that narrative at all. I'm not convinced the powers believe it either. It could just be the only card they were able to play. I don't like Fletch. At all. Realistically though, there just was no way he was going to make this team much better in this past off season. The team has far too many glaring needs that just cannot be filled by signing FAs. Hiring Torts allows them to produce some sort of story for the fans to tune in and watch. Some group of people will tune in just for him, and that's all they care about. This year will be all about Torts, and they're going to parade him in front of every camera they can. The team's play can't give them eyeballs, so they're hoping the coach will. To their credit, getting attention in the media is something Torts does very very well.

Forgive me if I wrote that in a way that bothered you or anyone else. That wasn’t my intent. I just meant to say talking about playing hard doesn’t mean very much to me. It’s just fluff language with no substance, and literally anyone could have spouted that talking point. And on a literal level, I don’t subscribe to the idea this team has sucked because they haven’t been trying. That doesn’t line up for me. It’s far more logical—and frankly obvious at this point—that the players we currently have are not good enough to compete in this league. We need more talented players, including proper elite players. Again, i can work harder too, but no amount of me working harder is going to win NHL games. To me, reducing the problems this team has to just effort feels like fan service distracting from the bigger issue.

Gonna need more than a sound bite quote for me. Playing hard is great, but they're still stuck in quicksand with this roster. I can play super hard too, but I'm not going to be winning NHL games no matter how hard I try. The title of captain is remarkably overblown. But I suppose we have very little to cling to right now as it is. It's something?

You're assuming he was the problem. He was one player, and a da** good one at that. It's not his fault the brass was incapable of building a team beyond him. He may not have been the second coming of Messier, but that doesn't mean his presence was a cancer. There is no single player in the history of the NHL who could have substituted with Giroux and made the roster we've had to watch the last decade into a contender. Well okay, maybe prime Gretzky or something, but I'm pretty sure the Flyers time machine is broken. My point though was that Torts is commenting on the state of the room now. I have no idea what it was like before Torts got here, but it stands to reason losing the team's most prolific scorer and longest tenured captain in franchise history is going to have an impact on the locker room.

I can imagine the "locker room" situation is probably even worse now that Giroux is gone. How bad it was before his departure is hard to say, but he was captain for an awful long time. Whether he was the greatest captain or just an okay one, it's still a hole to fill when that kind of guy is lost. As far as Torts goes, I do worry there's an awful lot of just flat out anger going around, and Torts has become this sort of beating stick to channel the frustration of a fanbase. Whether that type of thing is needed, I don't know. Whether it's going to be effective at much, I also don't know. It does seem to just be tapping into anger for the sake of anger though. It's almost like folks want to watch a Flyers reality tv show where no one really wins, but we get to laugh and scream at the tv for a while and feel some sort of misguided vindication. Ultimately, unless Torts plans to suit up and score a hat trick each game, it's not likely to matter all that much in terms of the team's fortunes on the actual ice surface and in the standings.

I get this line of reasoning, and you're not wrong, but it does suffer from Flyers tunnel vision. Patrick was a bust. JVR turned into a decent player elsewhere, but not the impact player one might want in a 2nd overall. Fair enough. That's one team though. For one thing, being a crappy team does not in any way guarantee a top 2 pick. It's more realistic to expand that to something like a top 3 or 4, maybe even 5. We may be in that ballpark this year anyway without doing anything, but it's way too early to say that for sure. But let's expand say to top 5 and look at what are likely the best 10 players taken at those positions over some number of key years. I'll go 2013 to 2017, as those would be players who are both still quite young and have had time to develop and show how consistent they can be. 2013: MacKinnon (1), Barkov (2) 2014: Draisaitl (3) 2015: McDavid (1), Marner (4) 2016: Matthews (1) 2017: Makar (4) Honourable mentions: Eichel, Heiskanen, Pettersson That's seven players. Now name the top ten NHL players in the league right now. All seven of those likely feature on that list, and the ones missing likely include top picks from previous years (*spit* Crosby). So while you're right in that picking high in the first doesn't guarantee anything, it definitely makes getting that caliber of gamechanging talent far far more likely.

It's a great question. I also think there may be competing issues at play for those two players in particular. For JVR, honestly I cannot see Torts giving this guy much of his time. JVR is exactly the kind of player Torts is known to hate on and often very publicly. It's a playstyle thing. Torts is a defensive coach who absolutely demands that all players on the team play defensively as a starting point. That is 100% exactly what JVR has never and probably just can't really do. He's been good over his career at putting up reasonable points, typically in front of the net, but he is in no way a 2-way player of any kind. So either JVR becomes something he has never been -- and possibly just can't do well at all -- or Torts would have to become a very different coach than he has been in the past. My money is on JVR taking a major backseat this year. Risto is a big of a different story. Here we have a guy who is horrible defensively -- something Torts typically loathes -- but he's also a guy who hits a lot. This falls in the incredibly narrow and very useless version of "hard to play against" for some people, and Torts may in fact be one such person. It's worth noting DeAngelo is also a guy who has a horrendous defensive record though, which means no matter what, Torts is not going to have a d-corps that is particularly strong in that dept. Given the "risto smash!" mentality and the lack of options, I can see Risto getting on the ice far more than his actual play ever deserves. That said, though I do think this team is going to end the season with an awful record, I also think they are bound to be better defensively. The Torts system alone should translate to much better defense. That may prop up guys like Provo in particular, who stands to have a reasonably good year under Torts I would think. Also if Couts can stay healthy, he will offer stable shutdown skill on the top line. There's no way this team is as porous defensively this year. They were among the league worst last year, so that's not exactly a big benchmark, but it is one spot in which I expect we should see a significant difference. The flip side to that is there's just no one around to actually score anything. With Giroux gone, no adequate replacement (e.g. Gaudreau), and with the introduction of defense-first Torts, I'm not expecting more than maybe 60pts from our top scorer this year. This team is going to struggle hard in the scoring department, and it stands to be painful to watch.

It's a solid idea. I'm not sure it'll fly with Torts though. Ostensibly, he would be competing for the fourth winger spot vs Laughton and TK. I mentioned before how I have a feeling Torts is going to like Laughton, so my guess is he gets more minutes under Torts, and possibly even top line minutes. JVR would have to beat out TK then for the fourth, which is maybe a toss up. More importantly though, just as Laughton strikes me as a very Torts player, JVR is the complete opposite. Obviously this is just my gut, and I definitely don't always get it right, but I don't think JVR fits the bill in a Torts-led system. If anything, he stands to get pushed down not up.

Bedard is really looking like the hype was bang on in this case. He's already looking like he's a class above the standard 1st overall.

I kinda feel like Torts won't rush it. He seems like the kind of guy who could be very picky with a captain choice -- some might say too picky even. I don't know that for sure, he just seems to be more a prove it first guy than a seize the day guy. That would seem an especially difficult thing to do with this roster as constructed, at least as it comes to on-ice performance. Couts is certainly the most proven player on the team, but he's not a generational talent type guy who can single handedly win games. It may be hard for him to stand out on the ice, not because he sucks, but because he's got little to work with. He may feel the loss of Giroux more than anyone else really, and possibly in several ways. I think it's probably safe to say Couts is penciled in as a high contender for it right now, but so much could change in a year with this roster. Fletch is unlikely to survive the full season, so what does the next GM bring? Does the aggressive retool line finally break down into a proper rebuild? If so, what happens to a guy like Couts? He's in his prime years now. He may want a cup and may not want to be part of a rebuild. We can sit here and say it isn't his choice to make necessarily, but a rebuilding GM might consider him a solid chip to kickstart said rebuild. I'm not saying any of those things will happen. I'm just saying those would seem to be likely possibilities. Realistically, this roster is the weakest on paper we've seen in a decade, and it's not like this decade has been one of great success. Any guesswork done now is going to be shooting the dark.

Sure but it's something at least. He's still on the team at all, which is uncommon for a late round pick. Canada isn't exactly hurting for highly talented juniors. The competition for those spots is fierce up and down the line up. Don't get me wrong, I don't think this guy is a saving grace for the team. But if he ends up even being a decent bottom sixer on the Flyers some day, that would be a nice change of pace for a 5th round pick. We don't exactly have great success with our later draft picks... or, you know, early round picks. I'm not looking for a plague elixir here. I'm just making a comment about something decent. Don't worry though! This team is still going to be digging a hole for several seasons yet. There will be plenty to gripe about. Feel free to keep the engine running.

I won't read too much into it -- since doing so almost always ends up in disappointment here in Flyerland -- but it's pretty fun to see a later round pick making a team like this.

Even if this happened, I'm not convinced the team would be so vastly improved. Gaudreau's production would have made up for losing Giroux, and Ellis could never have played every shift of every game. Gaudreau might have been a decent player to buoy the team a bit in it's rebuilding years, but I also think it would have been just more of the same. This team needs to suck. We need the hammer to come down on the decision makers, which is only going to happen if the team hits rock bottom. We also need to draft and develop some new homegrown talent. Bringing in Gaudreau would have made sucking that much harder (exactly as it did with Giroux) and ultimately just added a couple more years of mediocrity. If the org couldn't build around Giroux, they wouldn't have been able to build around Gaudreau either. So in this way, Fletch's ineptitude actually turned out for the better I think. I also hear a big part of not moving JVR was because he didn't want to move our 1st round pick for 2023. I said this elsewhere, but that is such a massive non starter given the state of this team. Had Fletch agreed to move what is almost guaranteed to be a very high pick in a stacked draft year, it would have been a far worse result still. We need young elite talent way more than we need a 28 year old Gaudreau signed for 10M and making maybe 60-80pts at best for the next four years. This just isn't the team for a Gaudreau.

I agree with all of this. You know what the saddest part of this is for me? I'm not at all surprised at any of the things that have gone down with only one exception: I was honestly convinced Fletch would send our 1st from next year's draft to move JVR and try and sign Gaudreau. That really is the only thing that's surprising to me. I didn't want him to do that at all! Don't get me wrong. We should absolutely be a bottom five team next season, and the absolute last thing this franchise needs right now is to trade away top five picks -- not to say potential lottery top 1-3 pick -- but I firmly believed Fletch would move that pick. It would have seemed like such a Fletch thing to do at this point. Again, I read all this other stuff and go "yeah, of course he did that." The fact he stopped right before making this one mistake of trading away our first for next draft is confusing to me given the endless stream of baffling decisions he's made since arriving here. That's... sad. That's so very sad.

Gaudreau's clearly a great player, but he's also 28 and coming off a significant outlier of a year. He's the epitome of a buy high candidate really. I can easily see Chuck tossing him 9M for seven years with a full NMC, and just ditching whoever else he needs to make the math work. I also have a very hard time thinking he'd be worth that type of contract. Ideally, JG will prefer going to a contending team or something and be willing to sign for less to get a few cracks at a cup run. At 28 though, and given the childhood team stuff, it seems almost inevitable that we're in line for our newest albatross contract signing. Besides, one might argue the Flames are one of those teams. He could just choose to stay put if a few runs at the cup is what he really wants most. At 28, my guess is he'll opt for money over glory. It feels an awful lot like the Hayes situation. Granted, Gaudreau is a better player than Hayes, but the situation still feels similar as far as the actual contract goes and its likely impact on this team for the next several years. But, they need some player they can brand and sell to try and put people in those seats. JG fits that mold admirably well on many levels.